I first met Professor Warwick at a signing of his new book QI. We chatted for a while... mutual acquaintances, all that sort of thing. (We do actually have some mutual acquaintances: we work in the same discipline, albeit he's at the top and I'm at the bottom.) A bloody nice chap he was, too.

Kevin Warwick, a.k.a. Captain Cyborg, is viewed with bemused contempt by many academics and technology enthusiasts in the UK. He is the man the media turns to whenever they need a sensationalist soundbite about robots taking over the world. A manic self-publicist with an unfortunately Gumby-esque public speaking style, Warwick has very little new to add to our understanding of cybernetics, robotics and artificial intelligence. But he has some great robot turtles (circa 1983) in his lab.

Highlights of his career include being stopped at customs for having a robot shaped like a cat (a sophisticated robot indeed - being a couple of servos attached to cat-shaped sheet of metal), writing doom-mongering books, and implanting a radio-transmitting chip under his skin that 'automatically' controls lights and doors in his lab (which invariably provokes interviewers to ask "so what?"). There are many more of his knuckleheaded schemes at the site blowdart mentions above, and The Register (www.theregister.co.uk) generally reports on his exploits (and debunks them).

He is a fervent believer in machine conciousness and would even go so far as to say that the department's crappy little reactive robots, the so called seven dwarves, are concious to some degree. This has lead to his beliefs being re-categorised as panpsychism. That is to say he sees conciousness in a glass of water.

The first implant, just for your infomation, could not be used for the things it was famous for. There was no way to track Kevin around the department let alone the campus using a tiny implant with a range of 20 cm. All those T.V. appearences where he is 'greeted' by the building were triggered by a card in his pocket; the same type of card that is carried by all cybernetics professors.

He is also famous for taking all the media attention for the department, regardless of who actually deserved the attention. This is not necessarily a bad thing for the shy, retiring academics but it does make Kevin a media whore.